Data Compression

The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of information which needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of info, which means that what will be erased at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the content and its quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find different compression algorithms that are better for various kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes lots of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action needs to have plenty of resources to be able to process the info fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm you will find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and certainly the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data much faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will speed up every website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. This high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, which is provided by the great number of clusters working together as part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and keep them for a month as they will take a reduced amount of space than standard backups and will be created considerably quicker without loading the servers.